A school that fought apartheid is threatened with closure. John Pilger believes it should be saved
Those of us banned from South Africa during the apartheid years have returning snapshots that swell the heart, offering a glimpse of what the future might be.
One of mine is from a recent visit to Woodmead High School, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Founded in 1970, Woodmead became the first school to defy the apartheid system and accept children of all races.
Remember that 1970 was probably the bottom of the abyss of apartheid; the fascist state of prime minister John Vorster was secure behind a web of laws and regulations that divided people, and sub-divided them, destroying families and communities.
Children especially were a target. Black, white and brown children sitting together in a classroom was anathema to the ideologues of “separate development” and its silent suburban collaborators.
Woodmead was the idea of a visionary educationist, Steyn Krige, who, on the school’s 25th anniversary, wrote: “The opening of the school brought to fruition the dreams of a group of dedicated people [with] a conviction that all right-minded South Africans had to do everything in their power to eradicate the evil of apartheid.”
Outside and opposed to the state system, Woodmead under Krige introduced innovations that also made it a pariah among private schools. “I am not an admirer of private schools,” he told me. “It was six years before they would even accept our existence.”
This was hardly surprising. The school was not only co-educational, but the first to replace the traditional prefect system with a democratically elected school council, consisting of pupils and teachers, and chaired by a pupil with meaningful powers.
“Integrated studies” was pioneered, drawing praise from and copied in other countries. Children were encouraged to use their initiative, and taught how to research from a diversity of sources.
“We had up to 40% bursary pupils of all races,” Krige said. “We were constantly threatened with withdrawal of registration, closure, legal action and jail.
“Our policy was to keep the state informed and to tell them when we were going to break the law, strengthened by the certainty that what we were doing was morally right.”
They survived by their determination and by what one teacher called “a combination of improbables”, and Krige was “a master persuader in Afrikaans”.
Krige said: “I worked on a premise that if we didn’t embarrass the authorities with publicity in the English-language press, the kind they hated, they might learn to ignore us. So I went to the newspapers and asked them to let us be; and we won their co-operation, and we kept going.”
The school’s funding came from parents who could afford to pay and from non-profit trusts and the “conscience departments” of business, both domestic and foreign, concerned about their image in the pariah state.
Since the fall of racial apartheid and the election of an African National Congress government, these sources have all but dried up.
If Woodmead High School does not quickly get R3-million to pay off its debts, it will be closed and the estate and buildings sold for a fraction of their true value. The staff have already received retrenchment notices and a demoralising atmosphere has fuelled mismanagement and seen the loss of 200 pupils.
Yet the school’s ethos endures. When I went to speak at the school, I was struck by the extraordinary political awareness of many of the remaining 160 pupils, who were prepared to debate and question the free market shibboleths of the “new” South Africa just as their predecessors had questioned apartheid.
Woodmead’s closure will epitomise the relegation of education to the demands of a “neo-liberal” agenda imposed by South Africa’s new (and old) establishment – an agenda that has seen teachers sacked, classroom sizes increased and innovation abandoned.
I asked Krige (who has since retired) how he would reply to the charge that scarce resources were needed elsewhere.
“Since the end of apartheid,” he replied, “state education has suffered with a tremendous backlog and is struggling merely to teach the basics. What Woodmead can do is draw on its unique experience and continue to contribute real innovation to this country: to be a proving ground for the future. That’s critical.”
It seems to me that an unheeded danger in South Africa is the disappearance of the proud heritage of the recent past, especially the preservation of those ideas and principles and forces for good that brought liberation and are needed today, at the very least, as vital living reminders that the struggle goes on.
If you would like to help Woodmead High School, contact the Woodmead Appeal, PO Box 68068, Bryanston, Johannesburg 2021; phone Donald Smith at (011) 462-6840 or Trevor Watkins at 083 441-1721; or e-mail to [email protected]